Tiger Woods and the end of journalism as we knew it

Sometimes, in this Great Recession we're in, I think of the state of journalism, particularly the coverage of the Tiger Woods saga. I can't help but remember back to 1992, back when I was a reporter for The Delaware State News, back when a dead end was really dead.

I think back to my first encounters with what I call "journalism of desperation," where reporters and newspapers will do anything to hold onto their jobs, even if it means making a spoiled golfer's sex life your front-page poster boy.

Forget about taxes, war and poverty; a woman swinging a 9-iron at a billionaire athlete will move those stories to the inside pages every time.

Back in 1992, even small newspapers had that mentality, and they never really lost it. The reporters and editors all had that dream of making it big, even if it meant lying, cheating and exaggerating stories until they didn't even resemble news stories anymore. They were merely blogs, just without a cyberspace to give them a port.

Back in 1992, just like now, jobs were sparse, but everybody kept telling me that I was lucky, because I had one (sound familiar?). But it was hard to convince myself of that, especially when I walked up to my apartment window, looked out and saw the crowded truck stops, the farm houses and a big NASCAR raceway that was the largest thing in Delaware's capital city, if not the whole state.

It was hard to convince me of that when my dream of doing meaningful journalism, the kind of stuff that ended the Nixon presidency, was shattered by a 25,000 circulation daily, long before Tiger Woods ever won a tournament. It was shattered by a newspaper where most reporters I knew quit into unemployment rather than wait for a better job offer that would get them away from the editors with the tabloid-inspired ideas.

It's been reinforced by news coverage of Tiger Woods, coverage that really is no better than the stuff the Delaware State News did 17 years ago, when we joked that the newspaper's motto should have been this: "Every story is a good story, especially when it's bad."

As a child, I envisioned looking outside the window of a New York newspaper and seeing the glistening facades of the Empire State Building and the World Trade Center. Instead, at our office in Dover, Del, I saw the cornfield that was never harvested, or so it seemed. There was a rail line that never had any trains. There was a crop duster that never really dusted any crops (yes, just like that famous scene from "North by Northwest").

I worked for a newspaper that still, to this day, does not have its own website. It still has the same design it had in the 1980s. It had its reporters writing front-page recipes. It substituted editorials for a "sound-off" column that included anonymous gripes from people in "Smyrna" and "Camden-Wyoming" that were borderline - if not fully - slanderous.

I felt so empty, and even useless. Just a few years earlier, I was a college journalism star at Rutgers. From 1990 to 1993, however, I was reporter covering something called "Levy Court" in Kent County, Del., run by a man who could say little more than: "George Schulz...he's a good man! Joe Biden...he's a good man!....George Bush...he's a good man!"

I'd go up to him and say, "Mr. Paskey, why did you open up a smelly sewage treatment plant in the middle of a residential community?" and he'd say, "Tom Davis, you're a good man!" and then walk away.

The editors knew this stuff was boring, so it's no wonder they pushed me to write stories I didn't want to write, the Tiger Woods kind-of-stuff that was more about projecting gabby headlines than making people's lives better.

One of them even went to an interview I had a with a woman whose husband served in the Persian Gulf War of 1991. The editor took no notes; when we got back to the office, she not only wrote the story for me - she inserted the quotes, or her version of them. Some of the quotes had electricity, and some even tugged at your heart. But many of those weren't even said.

After a day like that, I often looked out that window, and saw Dover. In my mind, I'd see that view, that dead-end view, and I'd paraphrase what Capt. Willard said in the movie, "Apocalypse Now," when he looked out at the Army men, and the flat ricelands of Saigon, and saw despair.

"Dover," I said to myself. "Shit...I'm still in Dover."

As much as I loved being a journalist, I always wanted more. Ironically, I didn't care so much about the setting, or even the money. I didn't care if there was a cornfield or a skyscraper outside my window. I cared about making an impact, and being in a position where I could bring about change.

From that apartment window, I felt far from that goal, perhaps as far away as the cornfields of Delaware were from the palatial headquarters of The New York Times. Now, 17 years later, I see the Tiger Woods coverage and, at times, I feel as far away as I did then.

I feel powerless, just as I did then, when I watched bogus quotes being insert into my story. I feel powerless as I watch the Woods coverage, realizing that journalism has little choice but cheapen itself, because Tiger Woods sells. With advertising revenue in the tank, what better way to sell your newspaper than to get the king of commercial endorsements on your front page every day?

I see the media lowering itself to the standards of that "sound-off" column, relying on nothing better than rumor and innuendo to drive the news. I see coverage that's repetitive and, frankly, getting so boring that I'd enjoy reading three recipes for Spam Surprise (an actual front page story from the State News) before watching another minute of "The Insider," and getting the latest dirt on Woods.

I feel powerless, just as I did in Delaware, when I couldn't stop the newspaper from publishing a story on a guy who was copycatting the Rodney King beating of 1991, claiming that the cops pounded him into the hospital. The whole thing turned out to be a lie, and I even suggested that to the editors. They printed it anyway.

That's not to say that I haven't made progress in 17 years. I certainly have much more influence now than I did then. I'm in a better position than ever to teach, and to shift attention away from the spoiled golfer of privilege who has never met an endorsement deal he didn't like, who has been wearing that Nike-swoosh hat on his head since he was old enough to crawl.

I've always found, to coin another Vietnam-era cliche, some light at the end of the tunnel. Whether it involved the stress associated with family, and having kids, and everything associated with the life, I always found a way around the dead end. I always found a way to move to a higher level, and put myself in a better position than I was before.

Now I'm not writing about vocabulary-challenged politicians in the middle of Delaware. I'm the transportation writer at The Record and The Star-Ledger. I write stories that got traction during the 2009 gubernatorial election, and one of them may have played a role in Governor Jon Corzine's election defeat.

I teach courses in traditional and digital media at Rutgers University. Now I walk up to the window in my house and see pretty houses on an old, suburban New Jersey street, and see Rockwellian holiday decorations lighting the street, and I no longer feel that pit I had in my stomach, when I felt like my career was going nowhere.

Now I feel an empty feeling, but it's no longer one of hopelessness. It's one of ambition, the feeling of being on the cusp of something good, even great.

But when I sat in the Trenton bureau last night, and I watched the tabloid T.V. shows pop on with their wall-to-wall coverage of Tiger, I couldn't help but get that old sense of helplessness back. I looked at the story I'm writing and I start to think: Who's going to read it? Will they care?

I forget about the accomplishments I've had; I can only think about where journalism is going, and it's not good.

"Tiger," I thought to myself. "Shit....it's still Tiger."

WikiAnswers - Is Tiger Woods mentally ill?

Is Tiger Woods mentally ill?

WikiAnswers - Does Tiger Woods have a mental illness?

Does Tiger Woods have a mental illness?

Healing thy mother's keeper

I have found the book of my life. And I didn't even write it.

I'm not even half-way done with it, but I feel like it's my story already.

"My Mother's Keeper," by Tara Elgin Holley and Joe Holley, is storytelling that's so vivid that the scenes seem to jump off the page. The descriptions are so effective in stimulating the imagination that a movie seems unnecessary (but I'm sure it could be a great one).

It's the story of Tara's mother, Dawn, whose descent into schizophrenia ended a promising singing career. Tara grows up knowing her mother, but not really knowing her sickness - not until she was an adult, really, and she tried to care for her, and keep her from being known as the local "bag lady."

It's a book that speaks to the power of words, and how good writing can help heal the wounds of the soul. Writing can be therapeutic not only for the writer, but also the reader - like myself - who can identify with the plight of the characters. In my case, I know them very well: Dawn and Tara's family resemble my own, in a way.

In my case, my mother had severe obsessive compulsive disorder, and lived with it for much of her life. She inherited the family disease, the symptoms for which were evident with my grandfather, great-grandfather and great-great-grandmother. Like Dawn, they battled their symptoms but never really found solutions.

Like Tara and Joe, I'm writing a book about it, and how I dealt with it all and learned from it. The book is entitled "Generations: A Portrait of a Family Struggling with Mental Illness," and I hope to have it done within the year.

In my book, unlike "My Mother's Keeper," the characters meet their demise too early. Suicide lingers in the shadows of my family, because it's how my great-grandfather, and possibly my great-great-grandmother, ended their lives. With my grandfather and mother, it was self-destruction through alcoholism and personal neglect.

But it's the kind of book that provides validation for your life. When you read about Dawn's impact on the family, you realize that you're not alone, dealing with the problems of finding care for a loved one when there really isn't any that is any good, or good enough.

You realize that you and your family, as well your children are susceptible to what seems like a family curse, and to think that is not the product of paranoia. If others suffer this way, so could you. If others could find a way to manage it, and address these issues before they manifest into something intolerable, so could you.

I've stopped writing over the past few days because I need to read this book. I need to see how Tara and Joe did it, and how they mastered the ability to write about how mental illness is not something that's only suffered by the homeless on the street.

It's something that affects people who live in California - where Tara's mother lived, and where Tara enjoyed a family life, and a sometimes stable one, being cared for by her grandparents before her mother was committed to a psychiatric hospital and her conditioned worsened.

It certainly affects people in Point Pleasant, N.J., a suburban bedroom community at the Jersey Shore, where I grew up, and dealt with my mother's symptoms of OCD most of my life.

There, in 2003, my mother passed away after a fall. She was heading toward the bathroom, worried that her chest felt tight and she was short of breath. The bathroom was where she often went in times of crisis, and she spent hours in there, washing her hands until they were red, and the skin peeled off. But she never made it; she collapsed on the couch, about 30 feet short of her goal.

In that same house, just two years earlier, she drank beer until she passed out in a reclining chair, uttering things that were incoherent before she, too, was committed to a psychiatric hospital. When she was committed, my father found cases of beer and boxes containing moldy pizza stuffed in the refrigerator.

Indeed, one of the opening scenes of the book made me feel like I was living it again. This scene was at Tara's apartment, and it was told by her husband, Joe:

It was a warm night, a beautiful night, but as we walked across the yard and stepped onto the porch, we could tell something was wrong. Empty beer cans were scattered about, and as we started to unlock the door, we could see that it had been forced open. I could feel the hair on the back of my neck prickle and my stomach tighten. Was the burglar inside? Did he have a gun? Should we hurry away and call the police?

As we slowly pushed open the door and peered into the darkness of the living room, I smelled the stabbing odor of urine and stale beer and an unwashed human being. In the darkness, I could barely make out someone sitting on the floor, someone mumbling incoherently.

I was scared, but Tara wasn't. She was angry and upset, not scared. She knew who had invaded her home, her well-ordered life. It was her mother waiting in the darkness. It was Dawn.

Like me, Tara loved her mother, and loved being with her, especially when she was young. In the book, she calls her "mommy," just as I did my mother, long after I wasn't supposed to call her that anymore.

But, when she was young, Tara went out for a car ride with Dawn one day, the door flung open, and Tara found herself on the pavement, with scratches and cuts. Or so her memories tell her.

When Tara played hide-and-go-seek with her mother, Dawn disappeared, and didn't reappear for a while. Instead of her mother coming out from behind the tree, and saying, "Here I am!" Dawn was gone.

Tara found herself in the police station, sitting on a counter top, eating ice cream, waiting for her grandparents to take her home.

The moment reminded me of the time I was 10, and I was chased in a department store by a woman who tried to stuff me in her overcoat. She chased me to the parking lot, and I hid between the cars while she looked for me. Finally, after looking for a good 10 minutes, she walked away and I warily walked back inside.

I found my mother looking at the clothes, the same clothes she obsessed over, and bought so many of them that she stuffed her closet, nearly breaking the sliding door. She had left me alone, in the book section, while she spent nearly an hour looking and trying on the same clothes, over and over. Each piece of clothing wasn't just the right fit....or maybe it was, she'd think, and she'd ask to try them on all over again.

I said to her, "Mommy! A woman just chased me around the store!"

"Oh, really. Wow," she said, half-interested. "Are you all right?"

"Yes," I said.

"OK, well I'm going to buy these clothes," she said. "You wait here while I try them on."

Then she left me along again, standing in the women's clothing section, feeling like I could be snatched at any second.

When Tara went to live with other relatives, she traveled with her mother from Hollywood, taking a long bus ride to Houston. It would be her last sustained experience with her mother, who would be taken away from her once they arrived.

From then on, Dawn would shuttle in-and-out of psychiatric care and institutions for the rest of her life, much as my mother did when her symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder worsened.

With every passing chapter, right up until Dawn grew old, and preferred living on the street, selling cigarettes, Tara offers a voice of frustration, but also a proclamation of love. She always kept her mother's within her grasp, and she was always ready to save her from whatever embarrassment she might cause, and she was ready to defend her whenever she was mocked or mistreated. She was always ready to commit her whenever she was a danger to herself, but she also realized that she could not always stop Dawn from being Dawn.

At the heart of my book is my mother, and how we showed our love in a similar way. In my mother's final years, we couldn't get close to her because she was afraid of our germs. She wouldn't let us kiss her unless it was all the way under ear, where her skin was red and chapped from the constant washing or her neck and face.

But we did the best we could, and like Tara, we tried to stabilize and comfort her life. We always wondered if we didn't do enough, even at the end, when we finally addressed my mother's battle with OCD after years of neglect, but it just seemed too late as her physical health declined.

Six years later, after reading Tara and Joe's book, I realize now that, perhaps, we did what we could do.

Neil Young/Heart of Gold

I want to live,
I want to give
I've been a miner
for a heart of gold.
It's these expressions
I never give
That keep me searching
for a heart of gold
And I'm getting old.
Keeps me searching
for a heart of gold
And I'm getting old.

I've been to Hollywood
I've been to Redwood
I crossed the ocean
for a heart of gold
I've been in my mind,
it's such a fine line
That keeps me searching
for a heart of gold
And I'm getting old.
Keeps me searching
for a heart of gold
And I'm getting old.

Keep me searching
for a heart of gold
You keep me searching
for a heart of gold
And I'm growing old.
I've been a miner
for a heart of gold.

More troops will mean more stress

Once President Obama announces tonight that more than 30,000 additional troops will be sent to Afghanistan, don't think of it as a solution or a Band-Aid.

Don't think that war is ever a solution to problems. At best, it's a measure of prevention; the use of force is sometimes - though rarely - necessary to secure the safety the United States.

Think this: Another 30,000 troops will eventually become veterans who will be at risk for post-traumatic stress disorder.

Remember that there will be more people who not only will be seeking assistance for their physical wounds, but also for their damaged state of mental health.

Since we've had two war fronts since 2003, we've already seen evidence of the impact.

The number of soldiers and Marines diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder jumped tenfold from 2003 to 2007, according to statistics released by the Army’s surgeon general, as reported by Stars and Stripes.

The military attributed the rise in the Army numbers in part to the increase in the overall number of soldiers exposed to combat, but also better record-keeping by the service. But soldiers realize that, if there was no war, the numbers would be significantly lower.

And the numbers could go up even higher since the symptoms of PTSD sometimes don't appear until 10 to 20 years after service.

There are places for veterans with mental illness to turn and find ways to escape a life of ruin and despair.

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's Center for Mental Health Services is accepting applications for the Jail Diversion and Trauma Recovery Program's "Priority to Veterans grants."

The purpose of this program is to support expansion of trauma-integrated jail diversion programs to reach the growing number of individuals with post traumatic stress disorder and trauma-related disorders involved in the justice system.

In recognition of the dramatically higher prevalence of trauma related illnesses among veterans, this program will prioritize eligibility for veterans, organizers say. Click here for more information on this grant program, along with the request for applications.

The age of Thanksgiving, and how to survive it

My "age of innocence" ended on a New Year's Day, back in the early '90s, when I heard a police call about a house fire in southern New Jersey. I was an ambitious, but somewhat undisciplined reporter in a rural area - rural for New Jersey - and I paid attention to police calls as often as I cleaned my refrigerator.

It wasn't just a lack of discipline, I should say. The cackles from the scanner normally sounded like the speaker at a McDonald's drive-thru. All you heard was the buzz. Something about this call, a four-alarm fire, made it louder than all the others.

I drove south, riding along Route 9 and through the southern New Jersey towns that a friend of mine once called "Appalachia by the Sea." They didn't have the big box-shaped shopping centers that New Jersey is known for. They were houses that looked like they were sinking into the ground. When we got to where needed to go, all we saw were these one-story ranchers, each of them looking like little tinderboxes just asking for abuse.

The photographer and I got out of the car, saw the charred house and walked up to it.

A man popped out and saw me and Dave, the photographer. The guy had a big gut and big red beard, a kind of scary looking guy who I didn't really have time to look at.

"Get 'em!" he yelled, and a big, drooling dog came running out, chasing me and Dave. I literally jumped on top of my car, and watched the dog leaping up at me, saliva forming around his mouth. The guy with the big gut laughed as he puffed on his smoke.

Dave? He was doing what he always did: He took pictures.

I went to the police department later, at Little Egg Harbor Township, N.J. I went in there with the prejudice that this is the kind of thing that happens there, that there was something about this class of people that made them not respect holidays. Who would burn their house on New Year's Day?

This was, of course, before meth labs were in vogue, so there was little chance that they blew up themselves.

"You should see what it's like on Thanksgiving," the chief said. "That's the worst day of the year."

He was right. Later, I looked back at old clips from The Press of Atlantic City library. Something happened on Thanksgiving every day for years. They weren't just petty crimes, either. Murders, armed robberies - they were Law and Order stuff, set in Appalachia.

You'd think holidays would be the easy time of year. People get time off, and get paid for it. They get to go somebody's house - hopefully - and eat somebody else's food.

But a lot of people don't get all that, and when they don't, they get lonely. And when they get lonely, they get depressed.

And if they're already lonely and depressed, they could even be angry. If they have to meet with family - family they don't like - the encounters could lead to what the police dispatchers call "domestic disputes." In the years after that fire, I covered a lot of these kinds of crimes, and my image of Thanksgiving changed from turkey and stuffing to crime and punishment.

Family issues inspired me to write about mental health. But maybe it was more than that: Maybe it was the experience of dealing with the average person, and how the holidays they have don't ever symbolize the joy and peacefulness of a Norman Rockwell painting.

Indeed, in this recession, a lot more people are closer to those people in Little Egg Harbor than they think. A lot of people lack money - last year, my brother-in-law joked that we're all going to be eating peanut butter for Thanksgiving this year, and he wasn't too far off - and that added stress is bound to make things busy for police departments across the country.

Worse yet, it could make things busier for mental health professionals who are dealing with people who just don't understand what is making them angry, depressed and lonely.

Mental Health America, a leading mental health advocacy group, understands this, and is trying to fight it and deal with it.

Many factors can cause the holiday blues, according to MHA: stress, fatigue, unrealistic expectations, over-commercialization, financial constraints and the inability to be with one’s family and friends.

The demands of shopping, parties, family reunions and house guests also contribute to feelings of tension. People may also develop other stress responses such as headaches, excessive drinking, over-eating and difficulty sleeping.

Even more people experience post-holiday let down after January 1. This can result from disappointments during the preceding months compounded by the excess fatigue and stress, according the MHA.

Mental Health America offers some suggestions:

- Keep expectations for the holiday season manageable. Try to set realistic goals for yourself. Pace yourself. Organize your time. Make a list and prioritize the important activities.

- Be realistic about what you can and cannot do. Don’t put the entire focus on just one day (i.e., Thanksgiving Day). Remember that it’s a season of holiday sentiment, and activities can be spread out to lessen stress and increase enjoyment.

- Remember the holiday season does not banish reasons for feeling sad or lonely; there is room for these feelings to be present, even if the person chooses not to express them.

- Leave “yesteryear” in the past and look toward the future. Life brings changes. Each season is different and can be enjoyed in its own way. Don’t set yourself up in comparing today with the “good ol’ days.”

- Do something for someone else. Try volunteering some of your time to help others.

- Enjoy activities that are free, such as taking a drive to look at holiday decorations, going window shopping or making a snowman with children.

- Be aware that excessive drinking will only increase your feelings of depression.

- Try something new. Celebrate the holidays in a new way.

- Spend time with supportive and caring people. Reach out and make new friends, or contact someone you haven’t heard from in a while.

- Save time for yourself! Recharge your batteries! Let others share in the responsibility of planning activities.

My own personal suggestion: If you're going light anything up, light up a firecracker or something. Don't play with matches, and stay away from meth.

Something about John

John Clear walked out of a jail two years ago, declared that he found religion and went home, to Point Pleasant, N.J., where he thought he could find a new life in an old place.

Maybe he could patch things up with his father, he thought, even though the two of them never really got along.

Maybe he could find old friends, the ones he left behind long ago, because the drugs got too big even for them.

Maybe he could find a job, and hold it for longer than a month this time. Maybe that brain power that was locked up long ago, the same smarts that made him the funniest guy I ever knew, could be put to good use for once.

John tried. But, like everything with John, it didn't last. Forty-two years old now, the funniest guy I ever knew can only sustain a life as a purse snatcher and drug addict.

At 42, the only thing that's long is his rap sheet. The only thing that's consistent is his drug use, usually heroin.

The only thing that's funny is that there were some of us who thought he could clean himself up this time, after trying many times. Now we play the fools.

You've heard this story before. Smart kid gets into drugs, and finds himself going through the revolving, recidivism door of jail.

For me, however, the old people from the old life never get old. I told his father the other day that no one inspired my sense of humor more than him. When I hear of this kind of thing, I feel like I could be looking at myself.

If I stuck with him, I could have followed the same path. I had a mother who was an alcoholic, too. I had a need to make others like me, too. I had a need to make others laugh. I got into trouble, too. I had the same issues of need, attention and gratification.

I asked his father if he was mentally ill. He paused for a few seconds. "He now says he's bipolar," his father said. "I don't know what to think."

Maybe we need to know that, I told him. Because that could explain everything.

Maybe I'm the fool, again, but maybe it could be the one thing that's needed to get him the right care.

Maybe it's the one thing that can turn him in the right direction, because his future looks far from the kind of life he knew growing up at the Jersey Shore.

Unless he gets a plea bargain, his life before he turns 60 will be concrete walls and bars, the same life that did little for him before, other than teach him how to become a 42-year-old man who snatches purses from people at children's stores.

John faces 10 to 15 years, possibly, in state prison. Last month, he grabbed a pocketbook from a baby carriage in the parking lot of Babies R Us on Route 36 in Eatontown, N.J., according to The Asbury Park Press.

As the woman put her child in her vehicle, John grabbed her pocketbook from her carriage. She began to struggle with him, and the handle of the purse broke. John escaped with the pocketbook, and left in a four-door Saturn, driven by his girlfriend.

By the time the woman managed to cancel her credit cards, John and his girlfriend - his father called her "the wheel" - had charged cartons of cigarettes and gift card purchases at Rite-Aids in nearby Neptune and Asbury Park, police said. Then they tried to buy the same items at a Walgreens in Neptune, but were denied.

The next day, in Wall Township, N.J., the girlfriend grabbed an 84-year-old woman's pocketbook from her shopping cart inside a Foodtown, police said. Some witnesses stopped her and managed to retrieve the victim's purse, but the girlfriend ran from the supermarket and got into a four-door Saturn driven by John.

Police said they sent out an alert to surrounding communities, and Bradley Beach police stopped the vehicle. After their arrest, police found the hold-up note. Now he's in jail, with bail set at more than $100,000.

This time, no one is rushing to get him out.

Two years ago, I got a call from John. We talked about how he wanted everything the way it was, sitting in my house, watching the Mets on T.V. , just like we did in seventh grade.

Or maybe we could watch the Mets at a bar, he said, and talk about running wild in music class, getting Miss Mason upset and getting tossed out in the middle of a square dance.

Two years ago, John was just out of jail, and he was on the phone, talking to me. He didn't want to get off. He wanted to stay on, his deep, husky voice bellowing through the speaker so much that I had to turn down the volume.

He wanted to meet face-to-face. But the more we talked, the more I realized: He needed more than talk. He needed something. He needed help.

He wanted his kids back. He wanted his ex-wife out of his life. The more he talked, the louder he got. By the time we signed off, I had the volume on the cell turned down to nothing.

This was John excited. maybe even manic. This was a man going through an extreme high, or at least acting like it, who had just lived a life of many downs and, apparently, was heading toward an even bigger fall.

This was a man with mental illness, I thought, because many people with mental illness just don't straighten out. Many people with mental illness lie to themselves, and to others. If they find a way to heal themselves, they realize they're never cured. They just find a way to manage.

And if they ever do find peace, they find it through honesty and truth, not deception, false hopes and lies.

But this was John, talking a good game, saying he wanted to straighten his life out. This was John, trying to get people to forget the state prison mugshot that's still on the Internet, a dark, fading picture that adds 15 years to his age.

John wanted me to write about his life, and everything that was wrong with it. He wanted me to write about it all. In the ensuing weeks, he sent me the letters he sent to the Ocean County Prosecutors Office, demanding a hearing that would address his desire to see his kids.

He didn't do this to himself, he said. He wanted me to blow the lid on the judicial system, and bring down all the people who, he believed, did this to him.

He wanted me to do it so badly that he tried to get others involved, getting one of them to send me a large envelope filled with documents that was a paper trail of the guy's criminal history.

"Let me see what I can do," I kept telling him, though I knew I couldn't do much.

I thought of things I could do. I thought of things I could write. Little came to mind, however. Work, school and family life always seemed to get in the way, of course.

But those excuses were easy. There was something else, something more that bothered me. It wasn't the drugs or his shattered family life. It was the jail or the mugshot.

What I wanted to tell him was, geez, John, I don't remember sitting down in my house, watching the Mets.

I don't remember John ever sitting down.

Whenever we did anything, it was usually a prank or something that 12 or 13-year-old kids shouldn't do in department stores.

It involved water balloons going "splat" against somebody's car windshield, with my hands covering my face in embarrassment. "Oh, no, we're going to get into trouble!" I'd say, and John would just laugh.

Back then, John didn't care. He didn't need to impress. He joked, and he joked often. But he didn't really lie.

Now the John Clear I know tells stories. He's in jail after telling his family and friends the same thing, over and over. I'm going to get it right, he'd say. I'm not going to do any more drugs.

He told another friend he had Hepatitis C. He had to be driven up to Asbury Park at 5 a.m. every day to get a shot.

The friend obliged, and this went on for weeks. But after a while, the friend caught on. Nobody gets shots at 5 a.m. for Hepatitis C. Nobody has to wait in the parking lot and wait for them to come out to get a shot.

"It was probably methadone," the friend said, the drug heroin users take as a cleaner substitute.

This was the same time as our phone conversation, when he told me he was done with drugs, that they were just some short, stupid phase of his life.

There's just something about John.

Bruce Springsteen — Nebraska lyrics

I saw her standin on her front lawn just twirlin her baton
Me and her went for a ride sir and ten innocent people died

From the town of lincoln nebraska with a sawed-off .410 on my lap
Through to the badlands of wyoming I killed everything in my path

I can't say that Im sorry for the things that we done
At least for a little while sir me and her we had us some fun

The jury brought in a guilty verdict and the judge he sentenced me to death
Midnight in a prison storeroom with leather straps across my chest

Sheriff when the man pulls that switch sir and snaps my poor neck back
You make sure my pretty baby is sittin right there on my lap

They declared me unfit to live said into that great void my sould
Be hurled
They wanted to know why I did what I did
Well sir I guess there's just a meanness in this world